How to format your references using the Plant Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Biology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Smith M.S. (2012) Change the approach to sustainable development. Nature 483:375.

A journal article with 2 authors

Shcheka S.S., Keppler H. (2012) The origin of the terrestrial noble-gas signature. Nature 490:531–534.

A journal article with 3 authors

Silva-Santos B., Pennington D.J., Hayday A.C. (2005) Lymphotoxin-mediated regulation of gammadelta cell differentiation by alphabeta T cell progenitors. Science (New York, NY) 307:925–928.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yu Y., Jiang S., Zhou W., Miao X., Zeng Y., Zhang G., Liu S. (2013) Room temperature rubbing for few-layer two-dimensional thin flakes directly on flexible polymer substrates. Scientific reports 3:2697.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Castillo E., Cobo A., Jubete F., Pruneda R.E. (1999) Orthogonal Sets and Polar Methods in Linear Algebra. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Costa F.F., Conran N. (Eds) (2016) Sickle Cell Anemia: From Basic Science to Clinical Practice. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Cherry J.D. (2009) How Can We Eradicate Pertussis. In: Finn A, Curtis N, Pollard AJ (eds) Hot Topics in Infection and Immunity in Children V. Springer US, New York, NY, pp 41–51.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Plant Biology.

Blog post

Taub B. (2016) Meet Octobot, The First Ever Fully Soft-Bodied Robot. IFLScience [online] URL: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/meet-octobot-the-first-ever-fully-softbodied-robot/ (accessed 30 October 2018).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (2011) Information Technology: OMB Has Made Improvements to Its Dashboard, but Further Work Is Needed by Agencies and OMB to Ensure Data Accuracy. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Kessler C. (2013) Elements. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Hartocollis A. (2013) Two Wills, One Private Heiress. New York Times:MB1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Smith 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Smith 2012; Shcheka & Keppler 2012).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Shcheka & Keppler 2012)
Three or more authors: (Yu et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Biology
Abbreviation	Plant Biol. (Stuttg.)
ISSN (print)	1435-8603
ISSN (online)	1438-8677
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science General Medicine